


Come in Time

by Ryellee



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Kentarch 3, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, The Black Garden (Destiny), Vault of Glass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28409256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryellee/pseuds/Ryellee
Summary: Too tired to attemt a breakaway, Praedyth lies face up at a door sealed shut, counting cracks at the ceiling. A stray spider weaves her way up the time's gossamer patiently, looking for a keyhole. But there is a greater game, an infinitely more horrifying threat looming, on that makes even the Vex from the Vault cower away in fear.For everything in the Garden becomes of the Garden, eventually.
Relationships: Exo Stranger & Praedyth, Lisbon-13/Rekkana
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22





	1. Gossamer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Praedyth is a tired observer. Elsie has never been more patient.

He sees her in the Vault.

Hovering in between reality and hallucination, in those dense, fleeting spaces between the thought and the action, Praedyth focuses his tired eyes through the blur. He sees her as the Vex do – an array of possibilities fanning out across the tangled strands of time, multileveled causality built into its delicate structure.

Their vision fusing with his own is making his head hurt, a permanent itch in his sinuses like a sneeze forever coming up. He has grown used to it, but the urge to blink away the haze is ever-present.

She comes across as different, though; her layers overlapping, crashing into one another all at once, and wherever their angles touch the fickle time-web, it cowers away, coiling like tendrils. She walks the silver lines cautiously—breaking them—realigning—weaving bridges into existence over the gaping holes the Vex pierce to stop her.

He has only ever seen Guardians rearrange the pattern. Physical entities move along the lines of time like beads on a string, ever trapped within the rules of causality, not much interesting than cars in the streets. Guardians are undeniably more amusing to watch – icebreakers, tearing through the fabric with a blade of Light, sending the Vex into something as close to confusion as it could come for a collective mind.

She is not that crude. Her steps have the gentleness of a spider when she tiptoes on the great silver gossamer, careful not to tangle the wrong threads—she seems to know exactly what she is doing. He observes her, captivated, although it is difficult to keep his gaze focused for longer than a breath; the Vex have noticed her, too, and he now sees both with theirs and his own eyes. Layers upon translucent layers of possibilities, multiplying, stacking onto one another until they are a single white panel and his brain twists inside out from watching. He must look away unless his sinuses start bleeding.

He has seen her in every single timeline. Peeking through the looking glass, he has seen her silhouette reflecting in every timestream, her shadow over every possible alignment. A sailor upon the sea of time, sometimes she would wash up on a nearby shore and he would catch a glimpse of her; still, vigilant, a rifle on her back and wary eyes always fixed on the horizon. Her presence in the Vault does not baffle him (he is too tired to be baffled) but nevertheless, he welcomes the change. He watches her through a crack in his cell, a window left unnoticed by his keepers—or maybe put there on purpose, he would think, had he believed the Vex capable of malice—and just for a flicker it seems to him their eyes meet.

She raises the rifle—aims—shoots through a keyhole. A bullet ricochets off the wall of the cell and falls to the floor with a gentle clink.

For the first time in eons, or maybe split-seconds, Praedyth wonders about freedom.


	2. Fettered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crack is just wide enough to sneak a look.

“You’re not a Vex mind trick,” Praedyth states, turning the bullet in his fingers over and over. He does not know if she can hear him, but instinct makes him speak in the general direction of his radio anyway. “I’ve seen you in the network. The Vex can’t simulate Guardians.”

“I’m not a Guardian,” her voice pierces through the static. He still sees her through the keyhole, looking up at him, but the vision is shaky.

“Then how—”

“Light isn’t the only thing the Vex can’t simulate.”

Praedyth fiddles with the bullet. It is familiar—too familiar.

“Why are you here? Sabotaging the Vex is no use. They can go back and fix whatever damage you’ve caused, even if they can’t prevent you from doing that.”

“Whatever’s happening in the Black Garden is infecting the outside. I need to get in.”

The Garden, then. Praedyth’s brow arches slightly as a silver of interest slips through the dullness of his tired mind.

“The Garden was disconnected from the network after the Heart had been destroyed.” A fixed point, no matter where—when—his visions are currently taking him. Even at the birth of the universe, the Black Heart has always been obliterated. “Anchored to the physical space.”

“Not anymore. The gateway is on the Moon now, but after the last Vanguard operation it’s been heavily guarded. I can’t get through there.”

“Even if there had been a link through the network, the Vex erased it long ago.” He tosses the bullet up and catches it. “They hate the Garden ones.”

There is a hint of smile in her voice, even with the distortions, “There is always a keyhole.”

He chances a glance through the crack. She is almost translucent, the vision blurring, and he knows the signal is faltering. He does not have much time.

“The bullet—the gun,” a rush of urgency overcomes him, the strongest emotion he has felt for a long time, and something inside him panics the connection will break before he finds out, “I know it. Where did you get it?”

“Why do you ask?” She frowns, looking down at the nearly transparent rifle in her nearly transparent hands. “Well, you could call it a family—”

The rest is drowned in static. Praedyth curses.

The bullet hole is gone, or maybe there has never been one, or maybe the walls of his cell are nothing but a metaphor for confinement in perpetual forgettance. He does not care. Deliberating that only ever made his head hurt.

He puts the bullet next to the stack of identical silver bullets, now tarnished and dusty from lack of use, then lays down on his back. With eyes fixed on the ceiling, he falls into a stupor, not even bothering to acknowledge the cracks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will try to keep the chapters short (~500 words probably), overall I want this story to be in a kind of "lorebook format". What I love about D2 lorebooks is their entries often aren't connected very tightly, rather they feel like glimpses into the same story, snippets of it, with lots of space in between you can fill yourself as a reader. We'll see how it goes (heh), but that's the plan for now. The Vex strive towards entropy, so we can have a little entropy in a story about the Vex, yo.
> 
> Thank you for the comments and kudos and everything! <3 I'm so excited for this ride, and all the feedback fuels my passion even more ^-^


	3. Untethered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tune changes.

The Garden is calm.

Only the sound of Goblins shuffling through the greenery, laying down enormous slabs of stone in a regular pattern; only the gentle murmur of wind caressing flowers; only the pulse of growth, just on the edge of audibility—the Garden singing to itself, the Vex singing back—the song of creeping vines, of roots burying deeper into the earth, of trees shedding leaves to rot around its giant trunks.

Some would mistake that for serenity.

Tevis flutters through the Garden along with the breeze and falls from the leaves in drips of morning dew. He flows through the branches, tangled like veins, ramping up the rocks to reach the sunlight, fanning out their leaves for the wind to shuffle through. His body has already blended well with the soil; maybe a bone or two left, but he is not particularly intrigued to find out—he is of the Garden now, anyway, going wherever the Garden directs him. His essence flows through rock and greenery, bound to the current like a leaf floating along with the river. He is so bored.

As for an infinitely expanding plane of possibility, the Garden is remarkably dull. Its frightening powers don’t affect him now, not as they did when he was still a Guardian (sometimes he almost wishes for a hallucination to break the monotony). He sees it through its own eyes – it feels almost like the Light connection with his Ghost, but darker, colder. Thrust about by the current, he has learned to map some of its structures, distinguishing rock formations or trees in particularly interesting shapes. There is not much else to do other than watching the Vex tending the plants, their chassis shimmering in dull, eternal daylight.

Until he senses something.

A shift.

The tune alters—the music of growth changing the key, adjusting to a new tone that has slipped through the gates from the outside. The Vex raise their heads, stopping mid-motion. Recalibrating. It sends a shiver through the Garden, and Tevis shivers with it.

The Garden is resilient to surprise; when you’re a plane of infinite potential where every single moment can happen at the same time in all possible outcomes, it’s not that easy to shock you. Even he—the eternity of his immurement growing on him—has come to disdain the predictable dullness of linear reality. In their three-dimensional time perception any attempts of ambushing the Vex are laughable at most, like trying to solve an equation having ever learned only one operator. Or perhaps rather were, until the Traveler rolled in and blew up the chalkboard. Paracausality still knocks them off-balance.

So as the tune changes, as the Garden loses its focus for as much as a blink, Tevis feels his leash falter. A Harpy is hovering nearby, frozen in the air, its petals half-folded in perplexion; it refocuses its optics, listening, retuning to the new scale.

He sees a possibility.


	4. Augury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Consider the word: bond. Remember, as you wield this power, that you are not alone.” - Pujari, The Transcripts

Praedyth,

I implore, read this letter in its entirety; do not crumple it up and throw away after the first sentence that upsets you. I am well aware of the prejudice you hold against thanatonautics. But the matter is grave and I hope you manage to put your distrust aside and allow me to plead my cause, for your own protection.

I have seen you in the Garden numerous times. When I confided my concerns in Satomi, she told me she had experienced them too – identical as mine, vivid like waking dreams. The visions were… I wished to spare you the gruesome details, but maybe that, if nothing else, could convince you to play no part in this moronic figment of Osiris’ sick imagination. He sees the Vex as a puzzle, made for him to vivisect and understand; in his obsession, he underestimates the danger. They are not but a complex machinery whose circuits can be pulled out and examined at will. They are so much more than that—so much more than _us_ —they pierce through time like a needle through fabric, draping it, moulding to their will. They will always be ahead of us, no matter how fast we run, and they will always ambush from behind, no matter how vigilantly we watch out backs.

We know too little, too brittle is your Light to leave it at the mercy of monsters from legends. Kabr, for all his valiance, will go through fire and water for Osiris; he would not listen to me. Alemyr has her doubts but she is stubborn and will draw a bead on proving me wrong if I confront her. Pahanin just acts like a child—foolish or pretending, I do not care to ponder.

Praedyth, I have seen you die a thousand horrid deaths in glass and foliage. I have seen you stone-trapped, thrust by the ocean of empty ruin, swept away forever. For the bond of comradeship tying us together, for the sake of friendship, if it ever meant anything to you—

I beg you. Do not go into the Vault.

Pujari


	5. Unhinging

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slide through the door, or kick it down.

Imagine a river.

Imagine a tiny stream seeping through a crack in the bedrock, a spring pulsating with the primordial energy of the universe condensed in magma. Imagine that spring growing, gaining momentum, pushing itself forward over jagged rocks of a hostile world; the torrent swelling up and broadening into a river, spilling over like a peacock fanning out its tail. All that propelled by the ever-beating heart of the spring.

If they say time is like water (and Tevis may laugh but they are right), the Vex network is a silver grid overlying the surface: from one bank to the other, reaching the spring and spreading out far into the fog of tomorrow, towards the delta. The Vex move over it like pond skaters, only ever touching the surface, and in that they are greater than all the predatory fish dwelling in the depths. As for the fish caught in the web and tossed ashore to the banks of oblivion, there is no deliverance.

The Stranger is moving upstream, clinging to the silver bars with aching hands. The soles of her feet are barely brushing the sheet of water and every time they come in contact with it she feels dizzy. She was not created for this but she has learned her ways. The grid is a carcass woven into the essence of the world like laws of physics, a skeleton overlayed with the texture of millions upon millions of shimmering threads tangling up and braiding with one another, yottabytes of data zooming from node to node with a sizzle.

The Vex’s unease is palpable, every impulse trembling with it. She can hear it in whispers of code zipping past her, in hasty bounces through spacetime as units flick in an out of ancient fights yet to come in a desperate attempt to tip the scales. All gates to the Garden have been sealed precautionarily, but the black traces of fear still fuzz the signal like an infection clinging to the silver cobweb.

Whatever has been growing in there has grown tired of biding its time.

Everything that has happened is, somewhere, always happening; the Vex hate burning bridges. The Stranger knows it, everything inside these spaces tells her this, flickering synapses of that vast universe-mind speak it in each blink of an impulse. There is always a keyhole, she reminds herself, and rebraces the faltering grip of her tired hands on the grid.

She feels she knows the way now.

* * *

The radio comes alive with a familiar voice, but familiarity is a concept saved for linear time perception and Praedyth has long been stripped of that. He wonders whether this is before or after, is it the first time he hears her signal piercing through or have they truly spoken before, or maybe it is just a hallucination and she has been long dead by now. The bullet in his fingers is clean and silver, but perhaps it too has been stuck with him in the before while all the others carried on aging and gathering dust in some parallel timeline. He is too weary to analyse that, and the radio keeps on talking but he cannot focus on picking out the words.

“—you hear me? Hello?”

“Is it you or them?” he murmurs through stiff and tired lips, knowing well the question is entirely pointless.

“Oh, finally!” There is a hint of urgent annoyance in her voice. “It’s me. You said yourself they can’t simulate paracausality.”

“And you said you’re not a Guardian.”

“Listen, I found the link.” She speaks hastily. “All threads lead through the Vault, even the gate to the Garden. But I can’t break in from the outside, you’ll have to let me in.”

He laughs grimly, “If I knew how, I’d have gladly let myself out long ago.”

“You pulled the Ishtar teams out of the network sitting in that cell.”

So she knows about that. Interesting. The haze in Praedyth’s mind is gradually subsiding, and he sits straighter. “The door opens from time to time. Just for a moment, but enough to slip a signal out.”

“Can you slip me in?”

“If there’s a stronger pulse…”

He ponders it for a moment. With all the information flowing through and from the Vault, he might be able to tuck her somewhere in the stream of data. It is dangerous; if the Vex notice, he could as well just scrap the entirety of her from the time’s blackboard himself. A sudden sense of responsibility pinches him, followed by a rush of potential guilt.

“How die-hard on the idea are you?” It seems appropriate to ask, for her to choose the risk herself. He has got too much blood on his hands already. “Because if they find out, it’s a one way ticket to a stuffy cell like mine. Or worse.”

“I’ve been sailing these waters for a while now,” it sounds as if she was smiling, “I know how to swim.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Praedyth sighs, outstretching his fingers that have suddenly become so tense.

“Okay, then.”

The pulses are like a heartbeat, steady and barely tangible. He feels them in the floorboards, in the walls of his cell, in his own bones; hunched over the radio, he waits for the right note, an airwave swollen high enough—

“I’m in!”

He closes his eyes and a held-back sigh of relief escapes him.

“Good. Just… don’t touch anything.”

There is a soft chuckle in her voice, almost immediately cut short. “Praedyth. I think—I think I see your cell.”

Oh.

All thoughts rush at him at once, shock and doubt and yearning and panicked hope. He leans forward, towards the radio, as if that would help him see a proof—make it anywise believable.

“Can you…”

His breath wavers.

“I could try.”

Incarceration is a state of mind, maybe. A self-imposed safeguard to keep the spark of sanity alive, unfaltering by the infeasible dreams of liberation. In the timelessness of his imprisonment, even with all the dreams and visions that made his eyes well up with tears, he has long abandoned the hope of ever seeing the City again.

Because as the realisation strikes like an axion dart and Praedyth catches his breath, he wonders only so fleetingly—a flash of hesitancy and fear sizzling down his synapses—whether he truly wants to.

“You said the door opened from time to time,” she continues, sharp and rational a voice against the turbulence in his head. Dragging him to reality.

“I don’t know if it’s wide enough to pull me out. I had a hard time squeezing the gun through.”

His fingers reach for the bullet half-instinctively. Its cold surface brings him clarity; he fiddles with it, staring at the walls that kept him company for the past eternity.

“When’s the next window?”

“Hard to tell. They come at random from what I’ve observed.” He watches the cracks he has mapped in his mind better than the Tower’s floorplan, takes them in. “Do you have somewhere safe to hide? The Vault guards are… vigilant.”

“You do underestimate my capabilities,” there is a smile in her voice again, strangely comforting.

Praedyth thinks of every timeline he has seen her in, like a shadow always in the corner of the eye; his fingers close around the bullet.

They wait for the window, nerves strung and eyes narrowed, just the occasional huff of a breath slipping through the comms. The silence is fraught and uncomfortable but Praedyth is too fearful to break it, worried they might lose the chance if he gets distracted just for a moment. It is so hard to maintain focus in these timelost spaces, years and minutes drifting past like pollen caught on a breeze.

He nearly jumps when his radio sputters, fraying airwaves slipping into his cell from a world outside the Vault. He stopped caring which world that would be long ago; the infinity of his imprisonment has cured him of being faddy.

“It’s opening,” he mutters, “Do you see it?”

“Yes!” There is a gasp, as if she was running, “Hold on to whatever you’ve got there—”

Frantically gathering the scattered parts and shoving them into his satchel and pockets, Praedyth does not look away from the radio, as if it was the true gateway he is hoping to escape through to escape through. One hand is still squeezing the bullet. The keyhole is tiny, no bigger than this piece of metal, and his fear is so massive it folds into puckers to fit into his gaunt frame.

There is a roar, like the fabric of space tearing, like a million years’ worth of sound melding into one deafening note. Something grabs his hand and pulls him forward—headfirst into a crevice, into a shaft of white light he squeezes through with walls on all sides, bruising and scratching his skin. Gravity compresses his ribs as he plummets in horizontal free fall, eyes shut and breath bated, ready to scream—

—his back collides with the ground so abruptly it wheezes all the air out of his lungs.

Praedyth curls up, coughing. Blades of grass tickle his face, and a gentle breeze carries the sweet scent of ripe fruit. He squints in the sunlight and draws in a breath; the air tastes like flowers in bloom, and a summer morning, and life.


End file.
